


Tiny Developments

by Ladybug_21



Series: Growing Pains [1]
Category: Broadchurch
Genre: Baby Fic, Domestic Fluff, F/F, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:15:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24778258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: "I hope you understand just how much I love you," Maggie murmured."You know I do."  Jocelyn smiled.  "And the feeling's mutual.  Believe me, I wouldn't agree to have a child with just anyone."(Or, kid fic that literally no one asked for, including the author. Obviously AU-ish, with these two about twenty years younger than in canon.)
Relationships: Jocelyn Knight/Maggie Radcliffe
Series: Growing Pains [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1836136
Comments: 14
Kudos: 67





	Tiny Developments

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I'm really not even sure what this is, I have never written kid fic in my life and definitely never intended to, but I spent all of yesterday reading about upsetting things and needed to counterbalance real life with some total fluff involving happy families being happy, and this just kind of happened? Probably also stems from my underlying conviction that, while Maggie and her ridiculous journalist protégé are oddly adorable together, Maggie really deserves a better kid than the hot mess that is Olly Stevens. This entire fic assumes that Jocelyn and Maggie are about twenty years younger than they are in the show, for biological reasons—and no, I *definitely* haven't even tried to work out logically how that age difference impacts anything else (like the fact that it would make Jocelyn the same age as Sharon Bishop, but eh, whatever). I obviously own no rights to _Broadchurch_.

It wasn't that Jocelyn disliked children.

It was more that her entire life had changed so dramatically in such a short amount of time. Jocelyn still found herself startled when, in unexpected moments, she would suddenly realise that not only was she back practising law, she was living with a woman whose companionship she once had only dared to imagine in her most secretive dreams. Reserved as she was, the revelation made the barrister want to sing with joy, whenever it struck her anew that she was so loved. After all, until she finally had managed to tap into some hidden well of courage for Maggie's sake, Jocelyn had assumed that she would be single and alone and definitely childless forever.

Which was why Maggie's question caught her off-guard.

"Oh god, you hate the idea," Maggie muttered, biting her lip with a mortified look in her eyes.

"I don't," Jocelyn replied honestly, surprising herself a bit. "I've just never really thought about it."

"Really?" Maggie laughed. "I thought literally _everyone_ thought about having kids, at some point in their lives! Even if the thought was that it was the worst idea they'd ever had."

"I just... never thought it would be relevant to my life," Jocelyn explained. "I knew I didn't want children unless I had someone else to help raise them, and the likelihood of my ever having someone else seemed very remote until recently."

Maggie smiled and took Jocelyn's hand.

"So I've never really considered having children as being within the realm of things that were possible for me," Jocelyn concluded. "But I'll think about it seriously, now that it is."

"Will you?" Maggie's face lit up with delight, and she leapt forward and kissed Jocelyn. "Oh, petal, I can't even begin to explain how much it means to me that you're even going to think about it!"

Jocelyn smiled back, her heart fluttering strangely. Everything in her life was changing so quickly, but she felt oddly at peace with the thought of what Maggie was asking her. Jocelyn would be the first person to say that she was not a natural parent; fond as she had been of Jonah Bishop when he was a toddler, she knew that she was most comfortable with children when she could give them back to their parents if they were being difficult. But how could she say no, when Maggie was clearly so excited at the thought? They could work out the logistics of raising a child well enough, between the two of them. And while Jocelyn had once feared that she didn't know how to express love well enough to raise a child—that she might not _have_ the capacity to love a child as much as was needed—Maggie easily solved that problem; Maggie brought out the best in Jocelyn, and made her aware of just how capable of love she was, and expressed love so openly and unreservedly that any child she raised would be all but smothered with affection.

Jocelyn may not have trusted herself completely as a potential parent, but she trusted Maggie, and she trusted the two of them together, especially. It occurred to Jocelyn that a part of her had wanted Maggie to ask this question for some time, even if she hadn't recognised it until now.

"Of course I will," she promised, just because on principle, the rational lawyer in her wanted to think about it for more than thirty seconds before she said yes.

* * *

Jocelyn had known all along that Maggie couldn't have biological children, and she really wished that Maggie would stop being so apologetic about the fact because of course it wasn't her fault.

"So, given that that's the case, I was thinking we could adopt," Maggie offered tentatively.

"We could," Jocelyn agreed. "But you'd prefer not to."

"God, am I that easy to read?" Maggie blushed. "Listen, I promise that I'd love an adopted child _exactly_ as much..."

"Well, that's good, because I'm certainly not getting any younger," Jocelyn sniffed. She had been asking herself all along if a woman in her mid-forties should even bother getting her hopes up, but presumably a doctor would tell her if she was being completely unrealistic, or if it would be a serious risk to her health. Until an expert told her no, though, Jocelyn was willing to give it a go, if it was what Maggie most wanted. "I don't know if it'll be possible, Maggie. I hope you won't be too crushed, if it's not. But I'd be open to trying first."

Maggie reached across the table and took Jocelyn's hands in her own.

"Are you sure?" she asked, very serious. "Because I don't want you to feel pressured into something that you didn't ask for, just because I can't do it myself..."

"I'm sure," Jocelyn said. She wished she could explain to Maggie that being able to fulfill the requests of someone who made her so incredibly happy was a privilege, not a burden. "I have my limits, you know, and I'm usually not shy about making it clear when I've hit them."

"That's true," laughed Maggie, her eyes a bit teary. "Well, then, if you're absolutely sure, I suppose we need to start thinking about donors."

"Why not ask your brother, if you'd feel comfortable?" Jocelyn reasoned. "It only makes sense. Besides..." She paused, suddenly shy. "I only was really sure that this was what I wanted, after I realised how much I wanted to see your face reflected in our child's."

Maggie raised Jocelyn's hands to her lips and kissed them.

"I hope you understand just how much I love you," she murmured.

"You know I do." Jocelyn smiled. "And the feeling's mutual. Believe me, I wouldn't agree to have a child with just anyone."

* * *

And this was especially true once Jocelyn took full stock of what a bother it was going to be just to conceive. Doctor's appointments, fertility treatments, diet modification, blood pressure monitoring, not to mention the actual artificial insemination procedures themselves—it didn't take long for Jocelyn to feel rather resentful that most heterosexual couples could just take care of things at home quickly and efficiently, without having to worry about any of this expensive, time-consuming nonsense for the better part of a year. Maggie always reminded Jocelyn during these appointments that it would all be worth it, in the end—but then, Maggie wasn't the one getting her arms jabbed with needles.

(That said, Maggie always did make everything well worth Jocelyn's while, whenever they got home from one of these appointments. "If conceiving is going to take ten times the effort for us, we might as well get ten times as much enjoyment out of it," she reasoned, and Jocelyn certainly wasn't about to question that logic.)

All of the appointments and treatments and procedures were expensive, to be sure, but the problem of cost was not nearly as troublesome as the problem of working around Jocelyn's diary. She had made it very clear to Maggie that, if she was going to have to take maternity leave anyway, and otherwise limit how much time she spent up in London for years after, she was not going to let things alter her trial schedules before any baby was actually born. "Of course I'll be willing to make whatever sacrifices are necessary, but can't you let me spend the last few months of my old life normally?" she protested. And Maggie sighed and agreed, because she knew that Jocelyn was making the bigger sacrifice of the two of them already, and because she knew how much Jocelyn loved and needed her career.

"Oh, Olly's interviewing with some paper over in Brighton," she mentioned one evening. "Next Thursday, which means I'll have to find someone to go cover the council meeting that afternoon... remind me what time the appointment is, so I can gauge whether I'll have time sneak into the meeting after?"

Jocelyn had been washing dishes, but she shut off the water.

"You don't need to worry about it," she said shyly, glancing over her shoulder at Maggie. "We... don't need another round."

Maggie blinked.

"What do you—wait, are you telling me that...?"

Jocelyn nodded, blushing slightly as she turned around.

Maggie's hands flew to her mouth to cover her gasp. The next moment, she rushed forward and threw her arms around Jocelyn.

"Oh, petal!" she laughed. "I can't believe it. We're going to be mums!"

"A lot can still go wrong," Jocelyn reminded Maggie, but Maggie kissed Jocelyn to make her be quiet.

"A lot can go wrong at any time," she said. "For now, let's just be happy with what's going right."

* * *

One of the things that surprised Jocelyn most when she and Maggie officially became an item was just how physical Maggie was. Jocelyn was not the type of person to initiate touch beyond a handshake with the vast majority of people in her life, and perhaps no more than a light hand on the arm for anyone she really liked. Maggie, meanwhile, was the type to instigate all sorts of bodily contact that would never even occur to Jocelyn—hugs, slaps on the shoulder, kisses on the cheek, the occasional gentle smack to the back of Olly's head when he had done something particularly stupid. It took months for Jocelyn to learn to relax completely when Maggie crept up behind her, slipped her arms around Jocelyn's waist, and kissed her neck.

After nearly two years, Jocelyn had learned to expect such casual acts of physical intimacy from Maggie, even come to crave them. She welcomed Maggie's need to touch her, as part of the overall process of letting herself be loved by Maggie. But what Jocelyn found especially charming now was how, when Maggie slipped her arms around Jocelyn from behind, her hands invariably drifted to rest lightly on Jocelyn's abdomen, as if to offer the same loving reassurance to the baby developing inside. Jocelyn had grown accustomed to falling asleep with Maggie's arms wrapped around her long before now, but this small variation made all the difference to Jocelyn's belief that this would happen for them—that this _was_ happening.

And such gestures made it all worth it, as Jocelyn's body slowly began to change. Most days, she was able to observe the changes in her mood and in her eating with a detached interest that bordered on the scientific. But then there were days when hormones swung her emotions totally out of proportion, which was immensely frustrating for someone as generally rational as Jocelyn. Still, she had signed up for this, and Maggie was more than willing to mitigate things however she could, even if that meant massaging Jocelyn's swollen feet after a long day in court (wearing flats rather than her typical heels). The journalist took to preparing extremely balanced meals every evening, and even with the initial queasiness and her taste buds playing all sorts of tricks on her, Jocelyn thought it all was marvellous.

"When should we start telling people, do you think?" asked Maggie, clearly bursting to tell literally anyone who would listen. "I'm sure half the town's noticed how you've been glowing recently, it can't be just me..."

"Give it a little more time," Jocelyn requested. She still wasn't showing much yet, even five months along, and until she was, she felt like it would be bad luck to tell anyone, like it might jinx how well things were going if people knew. Jocelyn had read perhaps too much about the risks of pregnancy for women her age, and the only thing that could possibly be worse than miscarrying would be to miscarry and then face the quiet sympathy of all of Broadchurch.

The funny thing was that Jocelyn was enjoying this whole strange experience far more than she would have expected. Yes, she was constantly exhausted; yes, her body was aching in all sorts of inconvenient places; yes, she missed drinking wine in the evenings, and eating more salty food than was probably good for her, and generally going about her days without Maggie constantly clucking over her like an anxious mother hen. But if Jocelyn had spent so much of her life alone, she now was revelling in the sense of always having someone else there with her. Much as she was trying to resist thinking of the baby as a person before it was a breathing certainty, how could she _not_ think of it as an autonomous entity, when Maggie was constantly cooing at the swell of her stomach and gently kissing it whenever Jocelyn would let her?

Maggie was obviously very glad when Jocelyn had argued her last trial in London, seven months along, and was coming back to Broadchurch until after her maternity leave was up. Jocelyn's barrister robes had covered things up reasonably well in the courtroom, but as she made her way through the hallways of the courthouse, she noticed how people took note of her appearance. The few acquaintances she saw all offered their congratulations, after they'd gotten over their initial surprise, and Jocelyn tried not to feel too awkward about it. _It'll be over soon enough_ , she thought on the train ride home, and she was interested to realise that she'd miss this unusual degree of closeness with the baby, excited as she was to finally meet the tiny person nestled within her.

Maggie picked Jocelyn up from the train station and made her come admire all of the work that she had done on the future nursery while Jocelyn was away, before they settled down to watch the sun set as they ate dinner. As the evening faded into night, Maggie sat Jocelyn down on the sofa and asked her all about how the trial had gone, keeping one hand on Jocelyn's stomach so she could feel if the baby decided to move.

"At any rate, it'll be nice to stay out of court for a few months," Jocelyn concluded. "I feel absurdly bulky."

Maggie laughed at Jocelyn's pouting.

"Petal, you have never looked more beautiful," she reassured Jocelyn—and Jocelyn, watching Maggie grin as the baby suddenly squirmed, believed her.

* * *

Jocelyn hated appearing weak, in court especially and in life generally. She knew that childbirth technically fell into a different category than weakness, and that no one expected her to be at all stoic when in quite this extreme an amount of pain. But she still resented the fact that Maggie looked so worried about her, even as she held Jocelyn's hand tight and reminded her to breathe and kissed her clammy forehead.

One significant disadvantage to not being two decades younger, Jocelyn realised afterwards, was that she was more exhausted than she would have believed possible. All that she wanted to do was close her eyes and sleep for the next several days. But before she could do so, she saw that the doctors had placed their new baby in Maggie's arms, saw Maggie peering at the infant with such joy and wonder that Jocelyn simply couldn't look away.

"Oh, god, he's so perfect," Maggie whispered, more to herself than to anyone else, and then her eyes met Jocelyn's and she smiled radiantly. "Here, let's have you say hello to your other mummy who's done all of the hard work today, there we are..."

Maggie sat down on the edge of the bed and slowly transferred the swaddled baby to Jocelyn's arms. And Jocelyn gazed into the tiny face of someone who was too young to have many defining features of his own, but who somehow managed to be unquestionably both hers and Maggie's.

"How are you feeling?" Maggie asked, smoothing a few sweaty strands of hair away from Jocelyn's forehead with the tips of her fingers.

"Couldn't be better," Jocelyn replied very honestly.

And Maggie kissed her very gently, her eyes impossibly full of love and pride, before sitting back so that they could both silently admire the tiny being that they were now entrusted to raise.

Jocelyn had had plenty of time to get used to the idea of being a parent, but she still couldn't quite believe that this was her new role in life, alongside the others that she still had to manage. Even when she and Maggie returned home with their precious son, Jocelyn still didn't truly feel that this was all really happening, despite falling into a new, haphazard routine of sleepless nights and breastfeeding and nappies. And yet it was a very content sort of delirium, mostly because Maggie was there alongside her for so much of the process, rushing home from _The Echo_ as soon as was appropriate in the afternoons, clearly still walking on air and very likely driving everyone at the newsroom a little bit mad with her unrelenting excitement. Friends sent gifts: a warm blanket from Beth Latimer, a children's book of illustrated Bible stories from Paul Coates, a very soft teddy bear from Olly Stevens, a set of wooden building blocks from Sharon Bishop ("for building unassailable walls," she wrote in the accompanying note). Even Alec Hardy sent an almost illegible but heartwarming card that Maggie quickly assessed was slightly too gruff to have been outright dictated by Ellie Miller, although Jocelyn suspected that Ellie Miller had been the one to pointedly leave a blank card on Hardy's desk, in the first place.

And as happy as Jocelyn was, the full meaning of what she had gotten herself into wasn't quite apparent until several months later, one evening shortly after she'd finally begun working remotely on a new case. She had just wandered downstairs in search of her reading glasses (her vision really was going, she'd need to get it checked sometime soon) when she discovered Maggie and the baby dozing on the sofa, the journalist cradling their son to her chest with a look of pure serenity on her face. And all of a sudden, Jocelyn could see the next several decades spread out before her, as if captured in a series of photographs that had yet to be taken. Holidays on the beach, birthday parties with a dozen raucous children, school plays, football practices. Jocelyn scolding Maggie lovingly for aiding and abetting all sorts of childhood mischief. The expected tantrums and rows and reconciliations; the inevitable disappointments but also the wonderful little victories in between. A sullen teenage boy leaving both Maggie and herself shaking their heads in confusion and mild alarm over his secretive inner turmoils. A handsome university graduate with Maggie's twinkling eyes and yet a bit of Jocelyn's shyness about his smile, an arm around each of his proud mothers.

A surge of tenderness welled up inside Jocelyn as she gazed at her little family—so very different from anything she could have imagined, and yet more perfect than anything she could have wished for. It was well worth enduring the fifteen years spent agonising silently over her love for Maggie, to have reached this blissful moment at long last.

Maggie, as if sensing Jocelyn's presence, opened one eye and quirked a half smile.

"Everything all right?" she whispered, so as not to wake the baby.

Jocelyn sat down on the edge of the sofa, next to Maggie's hip. Very carefully, she leaned forward to kiss Maggie, then let her fingers brush against their sleeping son's pudgy cheek.

"I was just thinking," she answered quietly. "I love you, Maggie, more than I've ever loved anyone in the entire world. I was afraid that it wouldn't be possible for me to love anyone else anywhere near as much. But clearly I was wrong."

And Maggie smiled right back at Jocelyn as their family sat there together, an indescribably perfect universe unto themselves.

**Author's Note:**

> UPDATE: I have no impulse control and keep convincing myself that I have more spare time on my hands than I really do, so here, have a [sequel](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24835102) to this story, set eleven years later.


End file.
